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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Martha Nussbaum writes about wild animal suffering in the New York Review of Books.

Sort of. That exact wording is not used, and the utilitarian discourse on the subject not referenced, but it clearly is the same general thought. And it is very cathedralised. We have:

The "everything is political":

In the US, “wild horses” and other “wild” creatures live under the jurisdiction of our nation and its states. To the extent that they have limited rights of nonintervention, free movement, and even a type of property rights, that is because human law has seen fit to give them these rights. Humans are in control everywhere. Humans decide what habitats to protect for animals, and leave the animals only what they decide not to use.

One might grant that the current status quo is that humans dominate everywhere, while still recommending that humans simply back off and leave all the “wild” animals in all of these spaces to do the best they can for themselves. Even that proposal would require active human intervention to stop human practices that interfere with animal lives: poaching, hunting, whaling. And it would be, it seems, a gross abnegation of responsibility: we have caused all these problems, and we turn our backs on them, saying, “Well, you are wild animals, so live with it as best you can.” It is not clear what would be accomplished by this pretense of a hands-off policy.

The critical theorising:

There are also some very bad reasons for not moving against predation. Part of the Romantic idea of “the wild” is a yearning for violence. Blake’s Tyger and Shelley’s West Wind are emblems of what some humans feel they have lost by becoming hypercivilized. A longing for (putatively) lost aggression lies behind a lot of people’s fascination with large predatory animals and indeed with the spectacle of predation itself.

(And much more in this direction. That is most of the article.)

And just enough mention of the exterminationist angle to stay deniable:

Moreover, the animal reservation is geared as a whole to this exercise: the wild dogs are highly endangered, and much effort is made to preserve them. I am agnostic about the desirability of preserving that species, but I think here the central concern prompting preservation is a bad one: money from sado-tourism.

I find this interesting in light of an ongoing debate about cthulhu theory: Whether new leftist causes are relatively obvious consequences of general principles that have already been driving the movement for a long time, or have more short-term cynical explanations. I lean towards the former and think this example supports that:

I think that today, its easy to see the Singer&Co rationale in an article like this. But if the Motte-equivalent of 2100 is arguing about that, and everyone has heard stuff like the link in public school, and then someone tries explain how this was anticipated by the obscure philosoper Singer, I can imagine that going quite a lot worse.

Nothing new, "public intellectual" just discovered ideas vigorously debated on youtube, tumblr and reddit at least for 10 years and feels very very smart.

Everyone here knows about antinatalism, now look at efilism.

Efil = life backward, recognition that all life is suffering, extinction of all life is the only way to stop all suffering and is therefore absolute moral necessity.

Yes, all comic book super villains who wanted to destroy the world were the real heroes, and the super heroes who stopped them were the real villains.

Efilism is the next logical step after understanding Anti-natalism.

https://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2014/07/10/a-little-lexicon-childfree-antinatalist-efilist/

Now, let us look at the practical problems: is ending all suffering possible?

Yes, and it is easier and cheaper you would imagine.

Do not think about super plagues, nuclear weapons or asteroid hits - look at chemical compound called sulfur hexafluoride.

Ordinary non toxic, non flammable, non explosive gas, fully legal to buy and possess, useful for many industrial applications and goofy party tricks, that just happens to be 23,900 times more effective greenhouse gas than CO2.

It could be affordable for single billionaire to manufacture in secret enough HF6 to turn Earth's climate into Venus' one.

All life will cook out in few days/weeks and then all suffering will end for forever. Some bacteria might survive deep in Earth's crust, but they will not be complex enough to feel pain.

Mission accomplished.

I don't understand how antinatalism or elifism are given any credence at all on an intellectual basis.

Not in that I disagree with them, but they are so.. simple. Most edgy 4th graders hit their friends with a variation of "we can end hunger by nuking Africa huehuehue". It's the same idea, if there is some sort of universal accumulator, and you want to maximize the number there. If something is a net negative, you are best off stopping everything once and for all. Maybe in 11th grade, you can incorporate the concept of the expected value into that philosophy.

If anything its utilitarianism (with trepdiations) taken to its logical extent.

Simpler arguments are easier to onboard people onto than complex arguments.

I'm not sure whether high level philosophy is iterating on them much.

But they're really easy for young intellectuals to get into and develop strong feelings about. So it makes sense that they propagate.